[13thLetter]

Except for the small detail that these guys' project swiftly disintegrated due to personality conflicts, zoning issues, and possible fraud before it ever started, and the most damage it did was that a couple of contractors didn't get paid. Meanwhile, Chavismo has immiserated millions of people and imposed a corrupt authoritarian government on a whole nation. So the parallels aren't really very close at all.

[kafkaesq]

If you want a larger-scale example, the wholesale transformation of life in the U.S., Britain and much of the rest of the world since the early 1980s -- not strictly Randian, but definitely Rand-inspired -- hasn't exactly gone swimmingly well, either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

Of course radical libertarianism and authoritarian socialism, while both pipe dreams, are basically apples and oranges to one another, and can't be compared side by side.

But the point about the smaller-scale fiascos in Chile and Honduras is that it shows how farcical (and corrupt) that ideology can be whenever people do try to incarnate it in its purest form, out there in the real, actual world. This coming from people who claim to know vastly better about reinventing the world from the ground up.

"Glass houses, throwing stones", and all that.

[13thLetter]

If you really want to count up the number of corpses created by "radical libertarianism" and authoritarian socialism, we can just go right ahead and do that. I don't think you'll like the result, though.

[kafkaesq]

Of course "libertarianism" as such -- being even more farcical than nearly any version of socialism -- has never gotten a real toehold anywhere for any length of time, making the comparison moot. That's why I prefer to stick with comparisons of large-scale, real-life ideological systems ("by their deeds shall ye know them"). That is, not the platonic ideals that people (pretend to) believe in; but the actual, real-world systems they compromise for as its "best viable" approximation.

Which is where the body counts, ecological toll and general misery -- domestic and exported -- of the two allegedly opposite systems tend to even out to a far greater degree.

[mikerichards]

It doesn't matter how you to try to spin it. The vast scale of the horrors inflicted on humanity because of authoritarian socialism is well known and won't just go away.

[kafkaesq]

I never denied them, so I don't know what you're driving at.

I just don't think that being "horrified" at the excesses of only one extreme on the ideological spectrum -- whilst remaining indifferent (or willfully oblivious) to the skeletons in one's own ideological basement -- makes for a particularly useful or instructive view of the world.

[mikerichards]

The problem is that there are no real horrors of say libertarianism compared to the 100 million or so that were slaughtered, starved to death, enslaved, whatever..in the name of socialism.

At some point in time you have to deal with the reality that there isn't equivocation. I know some people have hard times dealing with it, and thus always pull the trick of "but look over here at this". It just doesn't work, but people don't seem to understand that it doesn't work.

[13thLetter]

> I just don't think that being "horrified" at the excesses of only one extreme on the ideological spectrum -- whilst remaining indifferent (or willfully oblivious) to the skeletons in one's own ideological basement -- makes for a particularly useful or instructive view of the world.

But the opposite, shrugging one's shoulders in the face of the explicit, obvious failure of a mode of governance and saying "well, who are we to judge really, these other guys did something bad once too," has its own faults. Namely, if we can't point at how Chavismo has played out so disastrously in Venezuela without getting uselessly entangled in whataboutery, what rhetorical tools do we have left to use the next time a charismatic socialist with an authoritarian streak starts getting close to political power in a democracy?

(Any comparison with the current political situation in a large nation whose name rhymes with "Bunited Bates of Bamerica" is, of course, left as an exercise for the reader.)